Here is problem I noticed: Your rear delts will always go failure first. Once 1 muscle goes to failure rest will automatically shut down. So you cant train them in full potential.

Your wrist are not problem and if they are you can use straps. Your biceps are problem though but very minimal if you dont straight them fully at negative phase. Need bend them 145 degrees so they work mostly as stabilizers.

Best excercise is lat pulldown on cables. You sit on bench in middle back straight and you pull with both hands towards you from side. I dont know exact name for this excercise.

This movement is very minimal for rear delts but very strong on using scapula which is stronger and thus failure goes to lats first as long as keep arms bit bent.

Widegrip normal pulldown i can 180lbs x 8 reps without jerking. But side pulls i can do 280lbs x 8 reps both hands counted. This weight difference alone tells you something about rear delts

After you done this you can do isolation movements for rear delt+bicep. I do them on my chest day

It's actually close to bench press. The wider your grip is the more it takes on your chest but even with wider stance it's still very heavy for triceps eather way. If you reduce it to shoulder width it comes actually very triceps dominant.

Same thing with pulling. It's your rear delts that is doing pulling with lats. Especially in close grip pulldown it has even bigger role.

You have to remember that just because movement is compound it doesn't mean all muscles are doing equal work. Your example of rear delt is where is doing 95% of work and it will go to failure first. If 1 muscle goes to failure then another muscle can't assist it.

My example is where latissium dorsi is assisted with rear delts with less involvment (because your elbows are moving less in motion). You get assisted more with scapula so it's actually better excercise for middle/lower trapps than any typical pulling movement. Though it's not optimal for them because they can actually handle stronger load. You test yourself by sitting on row machine and instead pulling your arms back you pull just your shoulderblades. They can handle crazy amount of load up to 300lbs alone. I actually think that even my example you will failure first on rear delts but at least your lats are doing bigger work weight wise.

There is no best exercise. It depends on your strengths and weaknesses, your goals, the equipment you have available and your personal preferences. If an exercise is not something you enjoy doing, you won't do it so it's useless to you.

_________________Stu Ward_________________Let thy food be thy medicine, and thy medicine be thy food.~HippocratesStrength is the adaptation that leads to all other adaptations that you really care about - Charles Staley_________________Thanks TimD

I use pull-ups now for lats, but for years I couldn't get my lats with pullups because I wasn't making the mental connection with the movement, and ended up using my biceps to failure before my lats would get worked out. I always tell people to focus on pulling your elbows down, rather than on pulling yourself up.

What really made the mental connection for me, however, is what I would consider the closest thing to a Lat Isolation exercise you can do: Hook up ab straps to a Cable Pulldown machine, put your arms through then and pull down using only your elbows, forces you to use pretty much all lats with no bicep involvement. After doing that exercise for a few weeks, my brain finally made the connection and I can now target my lats with pullups quite nicely.

I think.. The dip is an exercise used in strength training. Narrow, shoulder-width dips primarily train the triceps, with major synergists being the anterior deltoid, the pectoralis muscles (sternal, clavicular, and minor), and the rhomboid muscles of the back (in that order).

Lat pulldowns are great exercises though getting the form down can be tricky. What I find is people "burn out" their rear deltoids by either having trouble focusing on flexing and extending the lats predominantly in the movement. This meaning that they use a lot of arms and rear delts to bring the bar down and not as much lat. Or people lean back a little too much and this can aid in putting more on the rear delts as far as work (turning it into more of a high row than a lat pulldown). Another really good lat exercise that I enjoy is a standing straight arm pushdown with a cable. I usually cue people in that movement to act as if they are holding mail under their armpit trying to use their keys to open their door when they get home, with the "mail under the arm being a cue". This being because a lot people seem to flex there lats and squeeze their arm to their side to complete this type of action.

Lat pulldowns are great exercises though getting the form down can be tricky. What I find is people "burn out" their rear deltoids by either having trouble focusing on flexing and extending the lats predominantly in the movement. This meaning that they use a lot of arms and rear delts to bring the bar down and not as much lat. Or people lean back a little too much and this can aid in putting more on the rear delts as far as work (turning it into more of a high row than a lat pulldown). Another really good lat exercise that I enjoy is a standing straight arm pushdown with a cable. I usually cue people in that movement to act as if they are holding mail under their armpit trying to use their keys to open their door when they get home, with the "mail under the arm being a cue". This being because a lot people seem to flex there lats and squeeze their arm to their side to complete this type of action.

The latissimus dorsi has been show to be highly active during both the lat pull-down and pull-up exercises when relative load is equal. There appears to be no difference in muscle activity between vertical and horizontal pulling exercises performed with similar loads. Since the lats are mostly Type II fibers (Paoli et al. 2013), the best exercises to build them are explosive exercises using heavy loads.

Research has show that muscle activity in the lats does not appear to be affected by grip width, stability at the hand, or type of external resistance used. During horizontal pulling exercises (rowing), the only variable that effects the lats is hand position. The supinated seems to be more effective that the pronated grip and stabilizing the back by doing either seated rows or one with a chest supports seems to be more effective.

While this is more anecdotal, since there are 3 distinct fiber regions (inferior, middle and superior) of the lats bodybuilders often switch between vertical and horizontal exercises using wide, medium and close grips (Ackland et al. 2008). Back is further trained anecdotally by low rows, middle rows and high rows. So planes of movement and grip width play a very important part in providing different types of stimulus to the muscles of the back. While many consider this to be anecdotal, this theory goes back to Joe Weider's muscle confusion principle which scientifically has recently been supported by studies done at Arizona State University and Federal University of Rio De Janeiro.

However, it appears that the latissimus dorsi is a prime mover during shoulder extension in the sagittal plane, in combination with the teres major and posterior deltoid (Ackland et al. 2008). The latissimus dorsi and teres major would be anonists and the posterior deltoid would be a synergists. Of course the biceps brachii would also be a synergists.

So, pulldowns, pullups or seated rows all work the lats, just make sure you are using a heavy load and doing explosive reps. I would also suggest that variations in grip width may also provide an different stimulus and stimulate further growth.

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